A2 - Analyzing Case Studies

Assignment 2:   Analyzing Resource Types and Organizing Principles

Assigned on January 28, Due before class on January 30

For the first three class meetings you read these case studies

• TDO 12.5 Organizing a kitchen

• Time Zones
• Orchestra Seating Arrangements

• Cookbooks
• Lettuce Production
• London Underground
• Organized Crime
• Pottery Production
• Intentional Communities

This is a large enough sample of case studies to show the diversity of resource domains that can be organized and analyzed using the concepts you learned in the first few class meetings.  

The following questions and tasks will reinforce what you learned and help you develop additional skills that you can apply when you design or analyze an organizing system for your case study this semester (and for the rest of your life!).

• Each case explicitly answers the question “what is being organized” but you can sort the 9 types of resources into a smaller number of resource categories. There isn’t a single right solution here; it depends on how abstractly you think about types of resources.
• The organizing principles that arrange the resources vary a great deal across the 9 case studies, but as in the first question, if you analyze these principles carefully, you should be able to find at least three examples where the same or very similar principles are being applied in more than one case study. Again, there isn’t a single right solution here; it depends on how abstractly you think about organizing principles

For this and for all other assignments in this course, you should organize your answers to correspond with the questions, so you should have two parts in your answers.